Community resources

The Syria Files

Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture. At this time Syria is undergoing a violent internal conflict that has killed between 6,000 and 15,000 people in the last 18 months. The Syria Files shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy, but they also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another.

The European Union and its Ten Mediterranean Partner Countries: Growing Trading Links is the title of the latest edition of Statistics in Focus, published in three languages (English, French and Arabic) by the EU-funded regional project MEDSTAT
II. The study concerns the trading relationship between the EU and its ten Mediterranean partners (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, West Bank and Gaza Strip).

The analysis focuses on describing the main structural patterns of trade between these two regions and on the main trends observed over the 2000-2005 period. It notes that the EU is by far the most important partner of the Mediterranean
countries, taking almost half of all their exports (48.7% in 2004), and is their leading supplier, accounting for 45.1% of all purchases made by the Mediterranean partner countries. However, the share accounted for by the EU varies widely
between the countries. For example, the North African countries tend to trade with the EU, which buys 83% of Tunisian and 74% of Moroccan exports, for example, but this share is much lower for Jordan, where just 3.2% of exports are destined for
the EU. The same goes for Lebanon, which exports more to its neighbours than to the EU. Wide disparities exist regarding imports too, in particular between the countries of North Africa, more than half of whose imports come from the EU, and
Syria (16.1%) or Jordan (23.6%).

The MEDSTAT II project was launched in 2006 with a total budget of €30 million. One of the programme’s main objectives, like that of the first MEDSTAT programme (1996-2003), is to harmonise the partner countries’ statistical methods with
European and international norms and standards. It also aims at enhancing the quality of services offered to users by the National Statistical Institutes and their partner organisations involved in the production of statistics.